


on the battlefield, give me fire

by statusquo_ergo



Category: Suits (US TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fix-It, M/M, Season/Series 08
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-17
Updated: 2018-09-17
Packaged: 2019-07-13 10:52:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16016408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/statusquo_ergo/pseuds/statusquo_ergo
Summary: It wasn't supposed to be this way.No, it wasn't supposed to be this way at all.





	on the battlefield, give me fire

**Author's Note:**

> This fic begins shortly after the end of “[Sour Grapes](https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=suits&episode=s08e07)” (s08e07).
> 
> It is 100% inspired by [soft-harvey](https://soft-harvey.tumblr.com/)’s [post](https://soft-harvey.tumblr.com/post/176748884433/for-fucks-sake-let-harvey-admit-that-he-fell-in) about letting Harvey admit that he fell in love with Mike without wanting to.

In the dim light of his hollow office, Harvey stands at the window with his third glass of scotch clutched in his hand and looks out across the cityscape and the East River glittering off to the right. In the dead of night, the view is an uneven blend of black silhouettes and bright rows of yellow and white lights, the sky a dusty sort of bluish grey, cars shuffling up and down the roads; “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE” is scrawled on the side of the Chemical Bank near the corner of Eleventh and First, according to _American Psycho_ by Bret Easton Ellis, though Harvey’s never been down to see it for himself. For all he knows, the wall is bare, but he prefers to imagine that the graffiti is carefully maintained, like some sort of historical artifact. A monument.

At this hour, it’ll take maybe ten, maybe thirty minutes for Harvey to get home by car. Fifty or sixty if he decides to walk. He has the sense that he should be annoyed by that, somehow, though it’s not his fault, the passage of time and such, and there’s really nothing he can do about it.

A gentle tapping sounds at the door, and Harvey takes a sip of scotch to keep from having to say anything.

“Harvey?”

Donna steps delicately across the floor, her loose fist still hanging by her chest as though she forgot to drop her hand after she finished knocking. Harvey watches her reflection draw near and decides not to turn around on the off chance that she’ll get the message and leave him alone, even though he knows it won’t work.

She stops maybe six feet behind him, positioned such that her body appears in the reflection right beside his, and he swirls the glass in his hand.

“I hope you didn’t take what Samantha and I were saying too personally, we were just joking around.”

Harvey blinks slowly, wondering where she’ll go next if he tells her he doesn’t care about all that, or how long she’ll keep trying to convince him it was all a funny little game if he doesn’t say anything at all.

“You and she have more in common than you might think,” she goes on eventually. “I think the two of you might even become friends, if you just gave her a chance.”

As though Harvey’s been the only one working to keep a healthy distance between them. She’s Robert’s girl, anyway, and Robert’s made his position clear enough; well, his impression of his position, anyway, and Harvey doesn’t quite have it in him at the moment to try to argue him down to a lower pedestal.

“You’ve been off your game, Harvey, a new ally wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world for you right now.”

“Of course I’ve been off my game,” he says crisply, without thinking the words through before they’re out of his mouth to fester in the thickening air.

Donna takes another step toward him, clenching her loose fist tight, and he deeply regrets having spoken as he braces himself for some self-righteous battle cry.

“If something’s wrong, we want you to tell us,” she says. “Louis and Gretchen and Katrina, and me; even Robert and Samantha, we’re all here for you, Harvey, if you’ll just talk to us. We’re a family, we support each other.”

 _They’re_ his family? Ha! They come for his throat every chance they get, all trying to control him, to manipulate him, to _use_ him. So maybe they really _are_ his family, because that’s what family does, isn’t it? They make awkward gestures and empty promises and turn their backs when it’s convenient, when he doesn’t meet their needs, or serve their purposes, or when they’ve _outgrown_ him.

“There’s nothing you can do.”

It occurs to him then that he hasn’t eaten any dinner tonight, although eleven thirty, or midnight, or whatever time it is by now, is a bit late for something like that, and he isn’t exactly hungry. Still, he has to take care of himself; there’s a box of spaghetti in the cabinet above the stove that he can make when he gets home, though he doesn’t think he has any tomato sauce left.

Donna lowers her hand, the reflection of her gaze meeting his as she tilts her head just slightly.

“This isn’t about us, is it?”

Of course it isn’t.

“Of course it is.”

She steps closer still. “Harvey.”

He didn’t expect her to believe the lie. It was a bad one, anyway.

He sighs.

“You know what it’s about.”

She reaches out to grasp his hand, and he tucks it across his chest, under his elbow, pretending the move is a coincidence and not some clumsy effort to keep her from touching him. Maybe she understands it for what it is, because she draws her arm back to hug herself tenderly.

“I miss him, too.”

Is that the word for it? “I _miss_ him”? Is that the turn of phrase, is that the name of this emotion? Not something louder, something stronger? “I long for him,” “I ache for him,” “I would die for him,” how to put it into words she’ll understand, words that won’t slip past as some shallow analogy, some sad little incomprehension?

He shakes his head.

“You don’t understand.”

“What don’t I understand?” she asks immediately, almost before he’s finished the sentence. She knew. She was waiting for the words, the excuse; is he so transparent? Apparently so.

Is he?

He stares out at the half-lit cityscape, the East River glittering off to the right and the dusty bluish grey sky overhead.

“It wasn’t supposed to end up like this.”

The edge of the glass bangs against his left incisor as he tosses back the last of the scotch in a single gulp, and thanks god or karma or the forces of fate or whatever that Donna has the good sense to keep her mouth shut for once.

“I didn’t mean to _love_ him like this.”

Each word comes out easier than the one before, but it still feels better to spit them all through his gritted teeth.

 “It was a mistake,” he snarls. “It was all a big mistake.”

She looks away pityingly, and he glares at his own reflection.

“Why didn’t you tell him?”

“How could I?” Slamming the empty glass down on the cabinets, he shifts all his weight onto his hands until he feels the strain in his shoulders. “How could I sacrifice his friendship, how could I give up everything we had for something so stupid? How could I— How could I be so _selfish,_ how could I _do_ that to him? How could I put that between him and Rachel?”

Taking the last remaining step, she sets her hand on his back, right over the line of his spine, and he flings her off, stalking off to the right as she sighs.

“He deserves to know you feel this way.”

“Why?” He laughs coldly, madly, frantically, shoving his hands into his pockets and glaring out at the Brooklyn skyline. “It was never going to work out; I took what he had to offer and I was glad to do it, and now he’s got his happily ever after and that should be enough.”

Donna presses her hand to her chest, right over her heart, as though it aches for him. Maybe it does, and who’s that supposed to help? No one.

Exactly.

“You deserve to be happy, too.” She shakes her head. “I know you don’t think so, but you do.”

He tips his head back, his eyes hooded against the half-lit fluorescents.

“I got what I had coming to me.”

“Harvey—”

“I can take it,” he speaks over her, not particularly in the mood for a rehash of the falsehoods and platitudes he’s already worn out repeating to himself. “I’ve got a lot of practice.”

“But you shouldn’t have to,” she pleads.

Shaking his head again, he turns toward the door and begins walking.

“I did what I could,” he says. “This is how things turned out.”

“But Harvey—”

“He’s happy,” he interrupts, finally deigning to look back at her with his eyes carved of flint and granite. “That’s what matters.”

A light flush colors her cheeks, and he wonders if she’s going to cry on his behalf. It wouldn’t do him any good; he’d rather she didn’t.

She clenches her hands into fists, and he turns back to the door.

“It’s late,” he says. “You should head home.”

She doesn’t speak; he goes, and that’s the end of that.

So this is the story of the demise of the great Harvey Specter. Knocked off his castle mount by some punk kid off the streets and rebuilt brick by brick around a hole in the shape of Mike Ross, somehow convincing himself, tricking himself into believing that everything good and true would stay that way, and so now, now he’ll be taken down by something as stupid, something as simple as never learning how to stand on his own two feet, never quite figuring out how to move beyond a sensational fantasy that was doomed before it even began.

It takes fifteen, maybe twenty minutes for Harvey to get home by car.

The doorman nods an acknowledgement as he boards the elevator, and Harvey nods back. He’d say something, “Goodnight” or another vapid salutation, but he knows from experience that Tom won’t answer, and the night is lonely enough as it is.

The elevator doors open on the twenty-first floor, and Harvey looks down at the floor as he walks to the end of the corridor.

So this is the demise of the great Harvey Specter.

“Mike.”

The night was already lonely enough as it was.

Mike smiles weakly, raising his hand to wave. To _wave._

“Hey.”

Harvey isn’t sure he remembers how to move.

“Mike.”

Mike lowers his hand and nods, and Harvey bites the inside of his cheek.

“It’s been awhile.”

“Yeah.”

Harvey glances at the door at Mike’s back and thinks about inviting him in.

“What are you doing here?”

Mike shrugs and takes a shallow breath, holding it for a few seconds before he blows it out through his nose.

“I couldn’t sleep.”

Harvey presses his fingertips to his palm. “You couldn’t sleep, so you flew all the way across the country to sit on my doorstep at one in the morning?”

“You can make anything sound bad.”

Harvey doesn’t know what to say, and Mike tips his chin down to his chest.

“I really couldn’t sleep,” he repeats, “but not just last night. It’s been a couple of months.”

Tilting his head, Harvey waits for Mike to look up again. It’s okay; it only takes a minute.

“Once we got settled in,” he says, “once things got up and running at the firm, once I had a second to breathe, I started thinking about how we left—how I left. And once I started, I couldn’t stop.”

“A lot of things happened pretty quickly,” Harvey says lowly, and Mike closes his eyes for a moment.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “After everything we’ve been through, after everything you’ve done for me, you deserved more. You deserved _better._ ”

Harvey scoffs before he can think twice about it, or stop himself.

“You did what you had to do,” he dismisses. “You did what you could.”

He’s told himself the same thing so many times, it has to be true.

What’s he supposed to do if it’s not?

But Mike shakes his head again, and what’s he supposed to do if it’s not?

“I could’ve warned you,” he says. “I could’ve told you about the wedding myself. I could’ve told you before the reception that we were leaving. I could’ve told you that it took me a long time to decide to take the job, I could’ve told you that there were a lot of factors to consider, I could’ve _talked_ to you about it, I could’ve—” He laughs coldly, and there’s a side to this story that Harvey doesn’t know yet.

“If I hadn’t been so stupid,” he rambles on, “and so narrow-minded, if I had run this by you, if I’d asked you for your advice, you could’ve seen what was going on, you could’ve known what was going to happen, you might’ve warned me, you might’ve— _saved_ me, you might’ve saved _Rachel,_ you might’ve saved _us,_ you might’ve… You would’ve fixed everything before there was anything that needed fixing.”

Harvey slips his hand into his coat pocket and closes his fingers around his keys.

“Let’s sit down.”

Mike nods, and Harvey steps past him to open the door. It occurs to him in a detached sort of way that Mike doesn’t have any luggage, any bags or suitcases, but that’s probably not the most important part of all of this.

He takes off his coat, hanging it in the closet, as Mike walks over to the living room area and doesn’t sit in either of the chairs, instead folding his arms over his ribs and dropping his shoulders down, his head hanging low. Harvey moves to stand at the edge of the carpet, resting his hand on the arm of the sofa, and Mike sighs through his teeth.

“When Forsyth first showed up,” he says, “he said the case against Discharge Power was going to be the one that made his name, it was going to be the one that put his new firm on the map. Before it was even up and running, it was going to be on the map because of this one little class action.” He smiles like he can’t help it, shaking his head and looking at the ceiling. “Do you know how many class action lawsuits are going on right now? Or ever, at a time? _Dozens._ You know how many of those the general public is even a little bit aware of? Maybe _two._ _Maybe._ And this one, this _one,_ was going to make him a household name.”

Harvey moves to stand between the sofa and the coffee table, and Mike shakes his head again.

“Our first case out in Washington was another class action, against Cardinal Health for— I don’t even know what it was for,” he brushes off with an indifference that turns Harvey’s stomach, “something about the opioid epidemic. Forsyth handed it to us practically right as we landed, he said it was ‘personal,’ somehow, and he wanted it taken care of by his ‘top guys,’ and I just…”

Harvey nods, moving back to sit down, and Mike leans forward to rest his hands on the back of the chair in front of him.

“We worked this thing nonstop,” he murmurs, “me and Rachel, and everyone else he’d gathered up to staff his little fantasy project, we pulled all-nighters and skipped meals and lived on Red Bull and fumes for _months,_ and do you know what happened? After thousands of hours of work and millions of pages of research? And a motion to dismiss?”

Harvey shakes his head slowly, and Mike smiles again.

“We’re headed for bankruptcy.”

What a hilarious story, Mike. Maybe Harvey should just drain his bank accounts and put this whole thing to bed.

Mike drops his elbows down to the back of the chair and presses his face into his hands, and Harvey glances at the closet where he hung his coat with the checkbook in the breast pocket.

He’d do it, too.

“Maybe when we finish this suit against Cardinal,” Mike speculates, slamming his hands down on the seat back and shoving it away, “ _maybe_ we’ll have enough money to last until the next one, but Harvey, we can’t afford to keep paying everyone on _nothing,_ on a _promise,_ on a—on a fucking _I.O.U._ They’re all going to quit, I know they are, the whole thing is falling apart, and all I can think about is how _stupid_ I’ve been, how _stupid_ I was to accept this offer, to believe that this was real, that I could have this, that it would just— _happen,_ and how could I do that to you, Harvey, how could I just _leave?_ ”

“You deserve to be happy,” Harvey replies flatly, because if that isn’t true, then what else is there?

Mike laughs loudly. “Happy?” he snaps. “This, _this_ is happiness? Are you telling me that I’m supposed to be happy with my life? With a wife who walked out on me, who doesn’t understand that I have to fix this mistake I made, who forgot to tell me that once I left New York, I was never allowed to come back? Gotta cut it off at the pass, Mike, we’re leaving that part of our lives behind us and making a fresh start! Oh, didn’t I mention that? Yeah, once we’re gone, that’s it, those people stop existing and we get to just forget about all of them, all the god-awful things we’ve done, whitewash all this shit and try again for round two!”

Close enough to see but too far to touch, he falls against the support column that interrupts the view of Brooklyn across the East River and slides down to the floor, and for a minute, Harvey thinks that maybe he should throw a glass at Mike’s head to remind them of the good old days.

He’d do it, too, except that he knows it wouldn’t help.

He stands between the sofa and the coffee table and puts his hands into his pockets as Mike rubs his fingers across his eyes.

“We’re calling it a ‘trial separation,’ but I know we’re not gonna come back from this one.”

So now what?

“And I figured, fuck.” Mike skates his fingertips across the floor and stares off into the distance. “My life is going down the drain; I’ve made so many mistakes, I make them all the time, every goddamn day, but the biggest one, the one that started this whole shitstorm, the one that keeps me up at night, well, why not…” He smiles weakly. “Why not go back to the beginning and try to make things right?”

So why not go back?

Harvey stands at the edge of the carpet and rests his hand on the back of the chair beside him.

“I forgive you.”

Mike laughs bitterly, narrowing his eyes over a delirious grin. “No, no,” he says, “see, you’re not allowed to forgive me. You’re not allowed to make this easy.”

Easy. None of it has ever been easy.

Harvey presses his lips together and looks down at the floor.

“Trust me,” he assures him. “You’d be doing me a favor.”

“What?”

Raising his eyes, Harvey meets Mike’s bewildered gaze, his unabashed amazement, and wonders what Mike thinks of his smile. Maybe it doesn’t look as pathetic as it feels.

“All I wanted was for you to be happy,” he says. “I thought you’d be happy following your heart, moving out to Seattle to run this new firm; I thought you’d be happy following your dreams, doing what you’ve always wanted. How could I tell you not to go, how could I ask you to stay here with me? How could I ask you to put yourself through that?”

“But you—”

“I’m done being selfish over you,” Harvey presses on, “and if you were finished here, if you’d gotten what you came for out of this place, and everything it has to offer, then I’m… I was happy for you, Mike, because _you_ deserve to be happy, and if you need to hit the reset button now, if you need to come back here and start over before you figure out where you really belong… Mike, I’m not going to stand in your way.”

Mike shakes his head slowly back and forth, rolling it across the pillar at his back, and Harvey needs very badly for him to take him at his word, because if Mike doesn’t believe that Harvey wants him to have everything the world owes to him, then what’s the point of any of it?

“Why are you doing this?” he whispers, and Harvey closes his eyes with a wearied smile. Do you want to know, Mike? Do you really want to know?

“You do things like this for the people you love.”

Thinning his lips, Mike bangs his head against the pillar at his back and squeezes his eyes shut, and maybe that’s all he needs right now. Just a moment to be crushed by all of this. It’s alright; Harvey will be here to pick him up when he’s through.

Mike takes a heaving breath, his chest quaking as he sobs without hesitation, without shame, and Harvey looks away and waits for the sounds to quiet, the struggle to be through.

“Mike.”

Mike shakes his head, his eyes still shut tight.

“I’m sorry, Harvey,” he says thickly. “I’m so sorry.”

Harvey smiles to himself at the inevitability of it all. The cyclical natures of their lives, their infinitely repeated mistakes, their best efforts never quite enough, but they’ll keep trying, goddammit, they’ll do everything they can until it all falls into place, no matter how long it takes.

“I know.”

Mike laughs, a trembling sound, and Harvey steps tenderly forward.

“You gotta stop doing this,” Mike says. “You gotta stop letting me get away with all this.”

“I don’t think you’re getting away with anything,” Harvey counters. “I think you’re trying to fix a mistake, and I think it’d be pretty shitty of me not to let you do it.”

Mike laughs again with an airiness that’s really more of a sigh, and opens his eyes to Harvey standing beside him.

“You gave me everything I ever wanted,” he says wistfully.

Harvey smirks down at his shoes. “I gave you Seattle.”

“ _I_ gave me Seattle,” Mike corrects, pulling his knee to his chest and wrapping his arms around it. “And then you gave me somewhere to go when it blew up in my face.” Clearing his throat, he tilts his head a bit to the left. “You saved me. You’ve been saving me ever since we first met; you saved me from the cops, from other lawyers, from…myself…”

Yeah, well. Someone has to do it.

Not that Harvey deserves all the credit.

“I’m proud of you, Mike,” he says, kneeling down beside him. “I hate that you had to go through all this, but you’re not looking for someone to blame, you’re not just—getting angry at the world. You’re trying to live your life, you’re trying to _fix_ your life, and I’m proud of you.”

Mike sniffles and looks down at his lap.

“Better late than never,” he mumbles.

Harvey smiles wanly. “Anytime you need someplace to regroup before you go back out and live your life, you know you can always come find me.”

Blinking a lingering wetness out of his eyes, Mike rubs his palm across the arch of his cheekbone and nods. “Back where I belong?”

Yes, Mike. Yes, exactly.

Harvey can’t push that on him, no matter how much he wants to.

“Look,” he says firmly, setting his hand on Mike’s shoulder because it feels like the thing to do. “No matter what, Mike, I’ll always be here for you. If you want to move to Seattle and find yourself in a lifetime of pro bono, I want you to do it. If you want to go back to the church and take another crack at teaching at Saint Andrew’s, I think you should go for it. If you want to camp out in the pine barrens and learn how to live off spring water and wild berries, I—have some questions, but Mike, you do what _you_ want to do, alright?” Harvey rubs his hand across Mike’s back and tries not to read into the fact that he hasn’t looked over once since he began talking.

“But…if you need any help,” he goes on, because he has to put it out there, just in case it isn’t obvious yet, “if you ever need anything, just…ask.”

And it’s not that he expects a grand gesture in return, a fierce hug or a rapturous cry of thanks, but when Mike only huddles closer in toward his cradled leg, his shoulders hunched up as though he’s trying not to cry again and his arms hiding his face as though he’s already failed, Harvey can’t help but feel that he’s done something horribly, horribly wrong.

So what’s he supposed to say to that?

“Mike?”

“When did I become this person?” Mike demands, lifting his head abruptly and glaring at nothing. “When did I become so self-centered that I could just _go?_ That I could just _leave,_ that I could just… _abandon_ you?”

Harvey shakes his head.

“You left because you wanted to help people, Mike, you shouldn’t be ashamed of that.”

“Help people?” Mike turns to him accusingly. “How? How am I supposed to help people when I turned my back the one person I owe the most in the entire world, the person I—”

A heated flush rises under Mike’s eyes, and he shakes his head, biting his lip nearly to the point of bleeding.

“All I wanted to do when I left was help people, and I was doing it, I was… I was trying, but I wasn’t— I could’ve done so much more, but all I could think about was how much I’d hurt you.”

More? More than everything?

Harvey smiles again.

“I’m flattered,” he says, “but you know you did everything you could. What happened in the end, it wasn’t your fault.”

“I could’ve fought for Rachel.”

Well. Maybe so.

Now’s not the time for all that.

“Tomorrow,” Harvey promises, “you can figure out what you’re going to do about that. About Seattle, about all of it. You can figure out where to go next. But for right now, just promise me one thing, alright, promise me that whatever you decide, wherever you want to go and whatever you want to do, you go after it because it’s what you want, okay? Not because someone drops it in your lap and you feel like you’ll be missing out if you say no, but because it’s something that’ll make _you_ happy. Not Rachel, not me. Not Andy Forsyth. Just this once, think about what _you_ want.”

Mike laughs thickly.

“Thanks,” he says. “But, just so you know, I don’t think I’d be able to live with myself if I left you again.”

Don’t. Don’t.

You don’t mean that the way it sounds.

Harvey sighs. “It’s late,” he points out. “You wanna stay the night?”

Looking around in a detached sort of way, Mike gets a funny glint in his eye that Harvey has a hard time putting a name to, a hard time getting a good look at. Then he smiles, and Harvey isn’t sure, but he thinks it turns into something a little bit different.

“I wanna stay until you kick me out.”

“Mike.”

Fixing him with a pointed glare, Mike arches his eyebrows, the last traces of tears seemingly faded away.

“You told me to think about what I wanted.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Harvey, I came back here for a reason.” Lowering his leg, Mike turns to face Harvey, sitting on his knees and pressing his hands down on top of his thighs. “I was angry, and scared, and I felt like the world’s worst failure, and I needed to be with someone who wasn’t going to judge me, or tell me I shouldn’t’ve gotten myself into this mess in the first place, or yell at me for not following their directions. I needed to go somewhere I would feel safe, and—understood, with someone I trust, someone I care about, and I came…here.”

Don’t say things like that to me. Please.

Harvey reaches out to press his hand to Mike’s arm.

“I’m sorry.”

Mike smirks, almost like he means it.

“Are you kicking me out?”

Harvey slides his hand up to Mike’s shoulder.

“Of course not.”

Mike’s gaze softens, and Harvey knows he’s waiting for the rest of it. For a second, he wonders how he can tell; no, it’s pretty obvious, if he thinks about it.

“I just don’t want you to feel like you have to stay for my sake.”

Mike reaches up to take Harvey’s hand from his shoulder, clasping it and threading their fingers together.

“Let me get this straight,” he says. “You think I’m staying because I feel like I have to. I think you’re letting me stay because you feel like you have to. And…everybody’s okay with this?”

Harvey chuckles, doing his level best to stop waiting for Mike to laugh and call him a fool for believing in any of this.

“You’ll be sick of me in a week.”

Shaking his head, Mike pulls their clasped hands close and stands, drawing Harvey up alongside him.

“I put up with you for seven years,” he murmurs, “and all I wanted to do when I got away was come back.”

So maybe this is, and always has been, the story of the rise of Harvey Specter; a classic five-act structure, the Falling Action at last coming to an end as his Catastrophe begins, the beginning of everything and the end of everything else. And maybe he has no idea what’ll happen tomorrow, how Samantha and Robert will rally against him, how Donna and Louis will try to shut him down as Alex badgers him for a name partnership, how he’ll force himself through another day at the grind, his passion slowly chipping away, leaving a trail of dust in his wake. Maybe tomorrow will be all more of the same, more of what he’s come to expect, of what he’s begun to resign himself to.

Or maybe there’ll be a new chapter of the story, the beginning of a sequel headed off in a radical new direction. Maybe things aren’t as hopeless as they seem; maybe the side of the Chemical Bank near Eleventh and First really is just a bare wall, and maybe Harvey doesn’t mind as much as he thought he would.

Then Mike drops his hand to slip his arms around Harvey’s shoulders and hold him tight, and Harvey doesn’t have the slightest clue of what will happen tomorrow, or the day after that, but he doesn’t think he minds at all. And sure, the world might be a dark and uneven place in the dead of night, but tomorrow will come soon enough as time continues its indifferent passage, and maybe it’ll bring something a little different.

Tomorrow, they’ll start again.

Tomorrow, everyone will see.

**Author's Note:**

> “You know what, Harvey? You want to come to my wedding, you let me know.”  
> [Harvey throws a glass at the wall next to Mike’s head]  
> “You want to go to prison? Rule number one: Never turn your back on anyone.”  
> —Mike and Harvey, “[25th Hour](https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=suits&episode=s05e16)” (s05e16)
> 
> “I already said yes. I I can’t go back on my word.”  
> “You’re not going back on your word. You’re going back where you belong.”  
> —Mike and Harvey, “[I Want You to Want Me](https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts.php?tv-show=suits&episode=s03e02)” (s03e02)
> 
> “Whoa! Whoa. Time out… Let me get this straight. You know her. She knows you. But she wants to eat him. And, everybody’s okay with this? DID I MISS SOMETHING?”  
> —Timon, _The Lion King_ (1994)
> 
> Classic five-act structure: **1\. Exposition** (establish time and place) **2\. Complications** (the course of action becomes complicated as tension mounts) **3\. Climax of Action** (the conflict reaches its apex as the hero comes to a crossroads) **4\. Falling Action** (the consequences of the crossroads play out as tension is heightened) **5\. Catastrophe** (the conflict is resolved through either the hero’s downfall or victorious transfiguration)
> 
> Ellis, B. E. (1991). _American Psycho_. New York: Vintage Books.
> 
> Feel free to say hi on [tumblr](https://statusquoergo.tumblr.com)!


End file.
